Tuesday, 9 April 2013

Over 150 Skulls, Bones Found In Mass Grave; Sri Lanka To Set Up Inquiry

Sri Lankan authorities will appoint a commission to investigate a
mass grave where more than 150 skulls and bones were found last year, a
government spokesman says.

Head of the government’s Media Centre for National Security, Lakshman
Hulugalle said on Monday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa had taken the
decision.

The grave, with skulls and bones of people thought to be Marxist
rebels killed decades ago, is located at a state-run hospital in the
central region of the country, said Hulugalle.

He told reporters the commission’s probe would be carried out alongside an ongoing police investigation.

Names of the members of the commission will be announced soon, he added.

Workers found the remains while doing construction last December at
the hospital in Matale, about 105km, northeast of the capital, Colombo.

The skeletons were found buried in neat rows, five or six stacked on top of one another, totalling 154 bodies.

Last month, a judge declared the mass grave a crime scene, saying the
skulls and bones recovered dated back 25 years and strengthened
suspicions that they belonged to suspected Marxist rebels killed at the
time.

Magistrate Chathurika de Silva told a court in Matale that tests
carried out by archeological and judicial medical officials showed the
remains dated to between 1987 and 1990.

During that period, thousands of men and women suspected of having
ties to the rebels disappeared after being arrested by security forces.

When the bodies were found, there were initial claims that they
belonged to those killed in an epidemic in the 1940s or in a mudslide.

But hospital authorities did not have any records of bodies buried on the premises.

A Marxist group, the People’s Liberation Front, which led two
uprisings first in 1971 and again in 1987 to 1989 against the
government, said the bodies may belong to its members killed by security
forces and demanded that the government conduct a full investigation.